


a heartbeat like yours

by londer



Series: five plus ones [4]
Category: Dimension 20, Fantasy High
Genre: 5+1, Canon-typical Underage Drinking, and they were FRIENDS (oh my god they were friends), friend fic!!, i love them and their friendship and want them to just get to vibe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-30
Updated: 2020-07-30
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:47:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25610818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/londer/pseuds/londer
Summary: Five times Kristen and Adaine hung out and also one more time they hung out because they're good friends who hang out together a lot
Relationships: Adaine Abernant & Kristen Applebees
Series: five plus ones [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2025167
Comments: 11
Kudos: 75





	a heartbeat like yours

**Author's Note:**

> i just love their friendship so much they should get to be fun silly teen girls together!!  
> there is no chronology to the pieces don't try and put together a timeline for it they're just! vibing!

_One_

"Stop wiggling," Adaine says sternly, glaring at Kristen in the bathroom mirror. She's trying to separate out the lower half of Kristen's hair but Kristen keeps twitching and it's hard to get a straight line. "I don't want this to come out all wonky." 

"I'm _trying_ ," Kristen says, even as she lifts up her phone to take a photo of their reflection in the bathroom mirror. She posts it to her Snap story and then puts her phone down on the counter and gives Adaine a perfectly innocent smile, the liar. 

"The undercut was your idea," Adaine reminds her. She takes a step back in the bathroom, surveys her work. The line separating the hair at the nape of Kristen's neck looks reasonably straight. "Here, does this look good?" She turns Kristen gently by the shoulders and hands her a mirror so she can check the back in the double reflection. "I can do that section and then we can go higher up later if it's not enough for you." 

"Yeah," Kristen twists a bit to check it and then shrugs in approval. "Let's get this gay hair." 

Adaine cuts off a sad little ponytail from the section before she sets in with the clippers. Kristen is still for once while Adaine works, and little wispies of hair float down onto the garbage bag poncho thing that they constructed to catch the runoff. Adaine's not really sure what she's doing, but she watched like four tutorials on how to use the clippers. So far Kristen isn't bleeding and it does look like an undercut so she'll call it a success. 

"Done," she says, turns the clippers off. She drags her fingers over the stubbly hair left behind. "Aw, Kristennn, you're so fuzzy now!" 

_two_

Adaine's fingers scritch gently through Kristen's hair and she carefully slides her scrunchie out without pulling too much. Kristen can't see from where she's lying with her head in Adaine's lap, but there's a soft noise on the bedside table and Adaine makes a smug little sound that means she successfully tossed it over there. 

Kristen just buries her face a little further into Adaine's side and lets the tears keep flowing. It's been a long, bad week; not for any specific reason, it's just been a lot of miserable days and hard work and little joy. School is hard, the church is hard, not seeing Tracker is hard, the million little annoyances that come from being alive are hard. Adaine had bumped into her in the kitchen by accident and Kristen had slammed her plate down in the sink so hard it snapped in half. They'd both flinched at the noise and the shock of it and Kristen had immediately started to cry, big angry wet sobs from deep in her chest. Adaine had simply picked her up in her arms and carried her down the hall to Kristen's bedroom (thanks, patricide, for the strength bonus). 

Adaine's hands run through her hair and over the top of her back as Kristen cries herself out, retching and gasping in the worst of it. She doesn't say anything, just sits quietly and holds Kristen to her. She can hear Adaine's heart beating from where her ear is pressed into Adaine's stomach. 

She feels empty, when it's over, but in a good way, like the part of her heart that was decaying has been cut clean from her chest. A full reset to her emotions. Adaine's still holding her and she smiles down at Kristen when Kristen finally lifts her head from her stomach to look up at her blearily. 

"Hey," Adaine says as she brushes a bit of Kristen's bangs out of her eyes. "Love you, Kris." 

"Love you too," Kristen mumbles. "Sorry about your shirt." There's a big nasty wet patch of snot and tears on Adaine's side, but she just shrugs, keeps stroking Kristen's back. 

"I'll get changed in a minute. How're you feeling?" 

"Bad. Better. I don't know," Kristen rolls herself up so she's sitting and Adaine folds her legs up so Kristen can scoot to sit beside her. She puts her cheek on Adaine's shoulder and Adaine wraps an arm around her and they both stare into the empty space at the foot of Kristen's bed in the quiet of her room.

_Three_

"That's the ugliest sweater I've ever seen," Adaine says. "You should try it on." 

Kristen giggles and drops the brown-and-blue woolen monstrosity into their basket and continues to flip through the rack.They can't all be Fabian with his dwarven-knit couture sweaters; some people are on a budget. Today's mission: clothes for the fall, preferably ones sized so that they can share. "Do you think I could tie-dye a sweater?" 

"Maybe," Adaine says. "Manually or magically?" 

"Yes."

"Manually would probably depend on what the sweater was made of, but magically should be no problem." 

"Tight," Kristen pulls two off-white sweatshirts off the rack. "Did you want to look for pants as well?" 

"Yeah," Adaine digs out a green sweater and immediately shoves it back in after seeing the huge rip in the front. "I want to try and find some corduroys." 

"Don't you already have a pair?" Kristen asks. They've reached the end of the sweater section and she heaves their overflowing shopping basket up off the linoleum tiled floor. "The blue ones?" 

"Yeah, but the inner thighs got all worn out to the point where _mending_ stopped working so I let Aelwyn cut them up into a skirt and some scrunchies."

"R.I.P. in pieces," Kristen says, making a fake little sad prayer hands gesture. "I liked those."

_Four_

Kristen's _wasted_ , head full of clouds and vision tilting and face split into a dopey grin. She's had one point five Mike's Hards, and she's feeling _great_ . She snuggles in closer to Adaine's side, tightens her grip a little bit around her waist and breathes in the soft laundry smell of her t-shirt. _The Breakfast Club_ is playing softly in the background on Adaine's laptop. Neither of them have seen it before, but only Adaine is really paying attention, in that scary intense way that she zones into things when she's drinking. 

"Can you pass the M&Ms?" Kristen mumbles and Adaine sighs, drags her eyes away from the laptop where people are dancing badly on tables. She has to shift away to grab the bag from her bedside table and Kristen grumbles incoherently as she pulls away. It's cuddle time, for fuck's sake! Adaine hands her the bag and Kristen balances it carefully on Adaine's lower belly so she can stay curled up around her while snacking. 

It's warm in Adaine's tower and warmer to be curled around her best friend and Kristen is definitely going to fall asleep any minute now. It's pretty irresponsible to zonk out without washing their faces or brushing their teeth or drinking some water to fight off a sugary hangover tomorrow morning. She's gonna do it anyways, though, because it's warm and safe here and her eyelids are already starting to droop closed. 

_Five_

Adaine shrieks and dodges as Kristen chucks an enormous plastic bat at her. It's only October first, but Kristen had declared it to be Halloween season and insisted they decorate the front of Mordred Manor appropriately. Fig had thought it was a good idea but was unwilling to help beyond going on the shopping trip and funding the endeavour. She left for Leviathan as soon as they all got home from the mall, leaving Adaine alone to help Kristen cover the front of the house in spooky paraphernalia. 

Not that she minds! It's been fun, even if she's hot and sweaty from the unseasonably warm fall weather they're having today. Adaine knows that Kristen's family used to do a lot of stuff like this for her and her brothers for All Hallows' Eve; that it was a good tradition that Kristen is trying to carry over to her new life. The Abernants never let her do anything for the holiday before, and she's looking forward to her first proper costume and eating a bucket of candy.

She had carefully _mage-hand_ ed up plasticky strands of fake cobwebs all over the front of the house while Kristen spray-painted styrofoam blocks mottled gray to look like gravestones. Now, she picks up the bat that Kristen threw at her and carefully clips its hooked feet to the rim of the front porch's roof. 

"We should do something with your tower," Kristen says eagerly as she wrestles plastic packaging off of a glow-in-the-dark skeleton set. "Like, this guy could be hanging from the bottom." 

"That's a little too macabre, Kris," Adaine says, wrinkling her nose. "Maybe he's like, climbing it?" 

"Totally," Kristen says, and starts rummaging through the bin of supplies they dug out of the garage. "Duct tape it up there?" 

"Sure! Ooh, what if there was like, a narrative, where it's being chased up the tower by something spooky?" Adaine says, catching the roll of tape Kristen tosses her.

"Giant plastic cockroaches?" Kristen holds up a bag from the store. 

"Perfect." It takes some doing, getting them up there, mostly because it takes some talking down to keep Kristen from trying to climb the rickety supports to tape everything up herself. The girl has _terrible_ dex and absolutely no sense of self-preservation.

+ _One_

"Nice," Kristen says.

"Nice," Adaine says back. They bump soda cans and then Kristen kicks her pool float so she drifts away from Adaine and spins a little bit. The July sun beats down hard on Adaine’s face and she tilts her head back to get a better angle for her sunglasses to block the light. She can feel herself getting a little toasty, but she put on sunscreen and besides, it’s the _summer_ and maybe she wants to get a little burnt. It’s not like Jawbone is going to get mad at her for it. The warmth floods her shoulders and chest and stomach, which is daringly exposed a little bit with the cutouts in the sides of her one-piece, and it’s a sweet contrast to the cool water her legs and butt and forearms are submerged in from her place drifting in an inner tube. 

Kristen drifts by behind her head and their tubes bump together and Adaine tips her head back all the way so she can look at Kristen. Her hair drags behind her into the water and Kristen waves and Adaine waves back. 

Kristen makes grabby hands at Adaine and Adaine nearly capsizes trying to grab her hand but she manages and they float together hand-in-hand sipping their sodas. 

“Otters hold hands to stick together, you know,” Kristen says.

“Are we otters now?” Adaine asks, sitting up a little bit in her tube to fix their grip. That is a _very_ cute image. Maybe they should learn how to _wildshape_ so they can be real otters sometimes.

“Fuck yeah,” Kristen says. “Otter buds who stick together no matter what.”

**Author's Note:**

> you can find me on tumblr [here](https://elsie-writes.tumblr.com)


End file.
